Two major problems which face our modern automobile based society are air pollution and energy economy. In order to increase fuel efficiency, automobiles and trucks have been designed to weigh less and to have aerodynamic shapes. In order to reduce pollutants, various types of pollution control equipment such as catalytic converters have been required in automobile and truck engines. However, such catalytic converters, while satisfactory under certain conditions for reducing pollutants are cumbersome, expensive, and detract from rather than enhance fuel economy.
Other efforts to improve the fuel efficiency of engines and to reduce polluting emissions have involved the processing of fuel in a fuel line leading to an engine by forming a magnetic field in a portion of the fuel line and causing the fuel to be processed to traverse and interact with the magnetic field. Such a unit is described in commonly owned copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 352,535, filed Feb. 26, 1982 now abandoned, entitled Fuel Line Device For Improving The Efficiency Of An Engine, naming John Mitchell as inventor therefor. Units for performing such processing as described in the aforementioned application, generally comprise a tube which is inserted into the fuel line and a pair of magnets embedded in a non-magnetic material and mounted adjacent the tube for forming the magnetic field. In such fuel processing units, the magnets are oriented such that their North poles are proximate the tube and the South poles are spaced apart from the tube.
Such units although consituting an improvement over the prior art, still have two main shortcomings. First they do not use an optimum magnetic field configuration for achieving maximum fuel economy and second they are cumbersome to install as they involve the cutting of the fuel line and the insertion of a tube into the cut fuel line through the use of hoses and clamps.
Accordingly, the object of the present invention is a magnetic device for processing fuel in a fuel line leading to an engine which is easy to install and which uses a magnetic field configuration which maximizes fuel economy.